Can We Use Minecraft to Develop AI?

Published March 17th at 10:30am

Earlier this month we saw Google’s AI ‘AlphaGo’ defeated a champion at Go - an ancient and incredibly complex game of strategy. This was seen as a groundbreaking moment in AI development, but due to the rule-specific nature of Go, we still aren’t reaching the holy grail of ‘general artificial intelligence’ just yet. That is, the ability to express intelligence across multiple and more salient situations. Researchers from Microsoft are eyeing up another game to help tackle this challenge though, Minecraft.

Researchers from Project AIX want to use the open-world game to improve its artificial intelligence systems. Unlike Go, Minecraft requires this general artificial intelligence; "Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it's this very open world," says Katja Hofmann from Microsoft's Cambridge labs. "You can do survival mode, you can do ‘build battles’ with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games. This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities."

Using games to test an AI's ability to teach itself a set of rules is an established approach, but most games used so far have been fairly simple. For example, last year the Google’s DeepMind created an AI that taught itself to play 49 different Atari games. This was a significant achievement, but the games involved were quite basic, including titles like Breakout that required the AI to only master a few rules in a purely two dimensional world.

To help its AI systems master Minecraft, the team made its AIX platform available to researchers in a small beta. For now, the experiments run on users' local machines, sectioned off from general users. "People build amazing structures that do amazing things in Minecraft and this allows experimenters to put in tasks that will stretch AI technology beyond its current capacity," Hoffman told the BBC. However, Microsoft aims to make the AIX available to anyone via an open-source license - although nobody seems to be sure exactly what this will look like for the general public.

One of the most exciting parts of this development is the ability to the put the AI into an avatar that would previously have only been playable by a human. This allows for the simulation of human behaviours more accurately than any other example of AI to date. You can tell an AI controlling a character to find the highest spot in the game, for example, and then the computer will have to work out how to navigate the terrain, make weapons, build structures and kill zombies. The scenario AIX finds itself in simulates real life (to a certain extent), it’s unsupervised and largely unguided learning.

"It allows you to have 'embodied AI'," AIX software engineer Matthew Johnson told BBC News. “We think this is an essential part of building this kind of general intelligence." It is this general intelligence that is the promised land of AI - a robot that truly thinks like we do. To some, this was always seen as nothing more than a far away dream. Maybe it’s time we woke up?